I feel like I am doing a lot of apologizing lately. I am sick of saying: "I am sorry", "Sorry, I did not mean it", "Please forgive me" or this one is creative: "Please, let me steam clean your carpets because I am oh so sorry I called you a choice word when we were fighting...Did you need to borrow any money? Like my new leather boots? Take them. Because, dammit, I am so sorry!"

When I think of mental illness--my journey sprinting through life alongside it-- I think of the image below. The famous Two Masks. I painted a picture of it, framed it, and gave it to my mother a couple of years ago. The irony was not lost on her. It hangs in the hallway; laughing at me. The masks represent bipolar disorder to me. They represent emotion on a whole--the entire spectrum. Like many people living with chronic mental illness, it's hard to find the parts that define the middle; the sort of happy bits that made us smile but were fleeting.

Do you remember when we were kids? Before life smacked us upside the head and screamed for us to wake-up? Before we realized life wasn't easy--once our innocence was gone. I remember how excited I was, five or six years old, sitting under the Christmas tree and shaking my presents. I would take my gifts and separate them from my two siblings. They would do the same. We all had our piles; each wrapped with ribbons and sometimes a bow.

Creating the motivation to recover from mental illness is a chore. That's why people who just don't like to get out of bed annoy me. Their lack of motivation comes from no reason at all--no depression, no anxiety, no medication side-effect. They just roll out of bed whenever they like. They make some coffee and do what they do. I don't understand lazy people. I hate the word lazy. I hate it when people think I'm lazy. I hate it because my parents never stopped working and never stopped driving the laziness out of us kids. If we kids did not work, we were That Thing (child) That Did Not Belong. But I love my parents and it is because of them I get the hell out of bed. Many mornings, they're my motivation to recover from mental illness and not be lazy.

Once a person has been diagnosed with a mental illness--is being treated for it--and moving forward in their recovery, life is not suddenly peaches and cream. For many of us, myself included, we still often live with depression on a daily basis.

I think I talk about stress and the impact it can have on our mental health often in this blog. Hopefully, it's not exceedingly boring. This blog is a bit different in topic. Yes, it focuses of taking care of ourselves during periods of stress, but also on how we can take care of those we love if they become ill---while knowing when to pull back.

So is recovering from a physical injury. But in a different way. You know this and I know this. A broken leg--I've had one--left me in bed and hopping with one foot to the fridge. I was terribly bored. If I could have moved, I would have drawn pictures on the walls. Probably with a black sharpie. I was angry! My point? Recovering from mental illness can be boring---certainly when our lives used to be painted in manic colors--nice and neon but scary too. Sometimes, downright terrifying.

WARNING: A decent amount of sarcasm within this post. But it's relevant, I promise you, sort of---I do.

Managing money while recovering from a mental illness is a topic I have never written about before and this sort of surprises me. It's important. It's important for everyone with a heartbeat--save for those too young to understand the often frustrating impact of finances on our lives. When you have been diagnosed with a mental illness and are working to recover, money takes on an entirely different meaning. It can, unfortunately, negatively impact our recovery.

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog on the topic of self-care when you live with a mental illness. Within that blog I focused on the importance of exercise, nourishing our bodies properly and having a regular sleep pattern. This blog will focus less on what we need to do to stay well but what we might consider avoiding--external and internal negative influences-- in order to recover from mental illness effectively.